When you think of your financial institution's website, you probably think about checking your account balance, finding a branch near you, or maybe looking into a loan. You're looking for information about your finances. You most likely don't think about their blog. Do banks even HAVE blogs?

As a content manager, I know how difficult it can be to wrangle consistent blog posts, especially from a number of different writers and contributors.

One way to ensure everyone is on the same page (and to keep you from pulling your hair out) is to establish Blog Guidelines.

Your guidelines can be as simple as a one-page Word document or a page on your website. Or you can create a polished, professionally designed document that makes you and your organization look extremely put together. Email this PDF to potential contributors to give them a good foundation for their writing.

If your blog is popular, you might have a lot of interest from those in your industry who want to contribute and get their ideas out to a wider audience.

Once you open the door to external bloggers, you'll certainly need established guidelines and standards.

Here are the main points to hit as you create your own Blog Guidelines.

We’ve all had those moments when the amount of content you need to create doesn’t fit into the amount of time you have for content creation. You end up having to make a choice between throwing a bunch of things together or spending time on a single piece of good content.

It’s a rough choice, a bit like having to choose between coffee and chocolate.

And you’re not alone. 51% of marketers say that finding enough time is one of their biggest content struggles. The next most common problem? Producing enough volume or variety, a struggle for 50% of marketers. It is possible to have both at the same time—a content mocha, if you will.

You've heard it before - blogging is good for SEO! In fact, you've probably heard this more than once from marketing pros, agencies, business pros, and even directly from Google.

While there are many factors that contribute to your rankings in search engines for various relevant search terms, quality content is one of the big ones. Because of this, many organizations are (rightfully) investing in blogging and other forms of content in order to give them some SEO benefits.

Others are outsourcing part or all of their Inbound Marketing program to an agency. This can free up your team to focus on the business while your agency takes care of your marketing. A primary component of most Inbound Marketing programs is a blogging strategy. A good program will include articles written with SEO and buyer personas in mind. These blog posts help your website rank higher for specific search terms and topics that align with your business. This is where good keyword research becomes important.

However, Inbound Marketing is expensive (until it becomes free). Because of this (especially at first), many people look at it and start to question what's going on. This leads to one of the most common concerns we see: "it sounds like I'm paying $5,000/month for blog posts!"

You probably view no less than 27 calls to action (CTAs) every time you log onto your computer. (I might have made up the statistic.) If you happen to be viewing this blog post on our website, you've seen at least 10. Regardless, they're everywhere - on web pages, sidebars, landing pages, at the end of blog posts, etc.

And though they may be small, they're incredibly mighty. In fact, I would contend that these tiny treasures aren't taken as seriously as they should. After all, visitors who don't click don't convert.

Still, some companies pay little attention to them for the following reasons (er...lame excuses):

It’s hard to get creative when you’ve only got room for two or three words on a button